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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? During another Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The power to initiate armed conflict, long considered a crucial legislative power, has become a murky prerogative of the executive branch in the years since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has asserted even more of that control for himself, authorizing strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

The authority over spending seems to have mostly been stripped from the legislative branch too; currently, under the office of budget chief, the OMB director, much of the power to allocate federal funds has likewise defaulted to the executive, with the administration claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized expenditures and seeking to move the money elsewhere. It’s not like they’re passing any legislation, either; almost all bills must now be crammed into spending packages, massive perennial essential omnibus legislation that can bypass the senate obstruction. But when those fail to be approved – and increasingly, they do not – the federal government simply shuts down. At least, big parts of the government shut down – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. Currently, the federal government has been closed for the entire month; there are no signs of it resuming operations in the near future. But the executive branch continues operating smoothly.

And so the issue of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should U.S. citizens care who has a controlling share in a institution that has largely abolished itself?

In what way ‘oppose the president’ messaging may assist the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Prop 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional House seats to the Democrats if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the political imagination of progressives nationwide. Partly, it is a belated reaction to trends occurring elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic biased redistricting while big blue states such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via nonpartisan independent commissions, an imbalance that has resulted in closely divided control of the House and a longstanding feeling, by Democrats, that their political group is at a disadvantage. The California proposal is explicitly designed as a response to a mid-decade redrawing of maps that was recently approved in Texas, which implemented boundaries that will give the GOP an five more seats in the state’s congressional delegation in the upcoming term; similar redistricting moves are under way in states such as the Show-Me State and the Hoosier State. (Democrats in Virginia are likewise emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems likely to be approved, as Democratic and liberal electorate respond with concern and frustration to Trump’s autocratic consolidation of power and look for methods to restrain his worst tendencies. But the proposition is not free from controversy. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with Democratic-controlled states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which Republican-controlled states do even more to design their districts so as to foreclose any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have critiqued the measure on strictly ideological democratic bases: a district that is created in such a way that the result of the election is never really in question, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely democratic: it means, inevitably, that the influence of dissenting voices is suppressed, and that the process of debate, argument and convincing that is meant to define a healthy democratic process will be confined only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these criticisms on their own terms. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to redraw their own maps in response, does not hold up as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to act in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ measures when they are already doing so without those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has not needed any incentive of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee permanent positions for their party: they have been ready to do this for its own sake, in the total absence of similar actions by the left, for a long time.

The second objection, I think, is more significant, expressing not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the GOP’s undemocratic turn, but a kind of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the United States has become. It is true that in a more ideal world – in the reality that the majority of the left, I think, yearn for and aspire to – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate disfavored demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their voters, rather than the other way around; it is negative that votes are made noncompetitive. That these actions have grown essential in order to impede the authoritarian advance of Trump’s power and reduce the level of suffering he is able to inflict is sad; it is a indication of how far we have declined from a state more like a democracy. But they are required. It is only once the battle against the current administration’s ideology has been won that we can lament what opposing it has made us.

If Congress fails to in practice have legislative, war making or appropriations power, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new blue representatives will be sent to Washington to do? One thing that the House and Senate still holds is subpoena power, and the power to investigate. Even in our time of stagnant government and congressional atrophy, it has utilized of that authority to great effect. In 2027, if the measure is approved and California’s additional representatives are sworn in, they will find themselves a member of a body with the authority to investigate the president, to televise their hearings into his actions and to force associates of his close advisors to give evidence. It’s not nothing, and more importantly, it’s not anything that any conservative would do.

• The columnist is a Guardian US columnist